I recently trimmed the Marin SoC's on-chip memory down to 4k. The
existing firmware for downloading srecord programs into external RAM for
execution was taking up about 2k. With 2k to spare, I was wondering if
you could fit a GDB remote protocol stub in there as well. It turns …

I recently fired up the Altera software, Quartus II, and spent a little
time porting the Marin SoC to the popular Cyclone II based DE2 board.
There's no external memory support yet, but on-chip memory is working,
and it looks like the on-chip bootloader is coming up properly. As
usual …

The interrupt controller is working now, as is the timer and my
exception handling firmware. So now I'm able to write a basic stop-watch
application, where the 7-segment display simply increments the count
every second. Yes, this sounds basic, but there's a lot of complexity
under the hood! This is …

A typical software debug solution for an embedded systems might involve
a JTAG connection to the board, and then some kind of protocol
translation software that handles communication between GDB's remote
serial protocol and the target JTAG port (see OpenOCD, for
instance). The FPGA systems I'm working with include JTAG …